Obama's Anti-Stimulus

When voters cast their ballots for Barack Obama last year, they could have been forgiven for harboring the expectation that they were voting for, among other things, a more humane American immigration policy. On the campaign trail, Obama had made such enlightened statements as:

Ultimately, the danger to the American way of life is not that we will be overrun by those who do not look like us or do not yet speak our language. The danger will come if we fail to recognize the humanity of [immigrants] -- if we withhold from them the opportunities we take for granted, and create a servant class in our midst.

For the most disempowered population in the country, as for many others, hope was in the air. For the first time, a person of color (and son of an immigrant) was poised to control America's sprawling immigration enforcement apparatus, and the Democrats riding to Congress on his coattails were bound to loosen the grip that Nativism had held on the Capitol for nearly a decade.

With the news of this week's government-coerced layoffs of a quarter of American Apparel's workforce, those same voters could now be forgiven for looking back on those speeches as so much election season pandering. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency's audit of American Apparel - and the layoffs that it has provoked - have put the President one big step closer to the position of Brian Bilbray, Republican Congressman from northern San Diego County and former lobbyist for the anti-immigrant, vigilante-friendly FAIR, who applauded the crackdown on American Apparel and complained to the New York Times of employers that have "become addicted to illegal labor."

To be fair, the targeting of American Apparel is entirely consistent with Obama's campaign promise to "reform" immigration by penalizing the companies that employ undocumented labor. By this, most would imagine that he had in mind the rampantly exploitative meat packing plants of the Midwest and South and the fly-by-night sweatshops of L.A.'s garment district, not a company that provides full medical benefits to its workers and a fulltime staff of masseurs to get the muscle knots out of the aching shoulders of tired seamstresses.

Why, then, has the Obama administration chosen to make such a special example out of American Apparel? One answer may be related to the special symbolic value that American Apparel, with its obstinate and principled resistance of the federal immigration enforcement regime, holds for anti-immigrant demagogues like Bilbray. The conjured image of American Apparel among American Nativists is part and parcel with the unique role the company plays in the Los Angeles economy, both symbolically and materially.

The American Apparel factory in downtown L.A. is one of the biggest manufacturing plants left in a city denuded of a once thriving manufacturing industry. During the 1980s, Los Angeles, like much of the country, experienced an exodus of blue-collar jobs as factories closed en masse as an outcome of America's losing position in the global race to the bottom (and Los Angeles' losing position in a regional flight of capital to the suburbs).

As scarcity of employment was replaced by an almost total absence of jobs for L.A.'s low-skilled workforce, the ghettos and barrios of South Central and East L.A. found themselves without even the prospect of upward mobility. The conditions of poverty ossified; rising crime rates, substance abuse, gang activity and other social dysfunctions followed. With no viable economic model emerging to fill the void left by the erosion of industry, and with "welfare reform" destroying the last pretense of government responsibility for the least among us, poor neighborhoods became veritable warehouses for the surplus working class, surveilled and contained by an increasingly paramilitarized LAPD. Indeed, if not for the enormous foreign-born population of Los Angeles, with its immigrant entrepreneurialism, its underground economy and its internal labor market, much of L.A. today would be the Sunbelt equivalent of a post-industrial Rust Belt wasteland.

In this context, the American Apparel manufacturing plant has been a monument to anachronism. In the '90s, as companies all over the country went "flat" and "flexible," spinning off actual manufacturing to contractors in far-flung continents and abandoning their downsized rank-and-file workforces to the low-wage service sector while consolidating design, finance and marketing in corporate headquarters in the financial districts of U.S. cities, American Apparel reintroduced old-fashioned Fordism to downtown Los Angeles. Vertically integrated from top to bottom and from production to retail (even its advertising posters are designed and printed in-house), the company is structured as much to produce employment as to produce t-shirts and underwear.

With the exception of the Green Dot charter school system, no other private employer in Southern California has made the kind of investment in an inner city community that American Apparel has. What the flat and flexible global economy was unable to do for Los Angeles' enormous poor population, American Apparel did for a lucky several thousand among them: provide good-paying, benefited jobs for low-skilled workers. It is this promise, this model for the economic advancement of poor workers, that in the midst of a recession of historic proportions Obama's ICE threatens to destroy for the sake of appeasing a few bigots in Congress.

If American Apparel were located in downtown Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Detroit, perhaps its workforce would have comprised laid off black and white American workers, and Republicans could join in bipartisan applause for its achievements. But as it so happens, it is located in L.A., the city with one of the largest immigrant populations in the country and easily the largest undocumented immigrant population (twice the size of New York's). No matter how much Brian Bilbray may dream of a lily white Mayberry in Southern California, this primarily Latino and Asian population constitutes the majority of the working class of the city of Los Angeles, and it is these workers who comprise the labor market that the garment industry draws from.

American Apparel is not unique among garment manufacturers for employing immigrant workers, with or without papers, it is unique for doing so by offering decent wages and benefits rather than subcontracting production to American sweatshops or offshoring manufacturing altogether. The President should be pointing to American Apparel as a model of the kind of investment our country should be making in our inner-city communities in order to steer ourselves out of an economic morass and toward broad working class prosperity.

Instead, at the Obama administration's behest, 1800 of these gainfully employed workers are out of a job in the midst of a national recession and a complete economic meltdown in California.

Where will these workers end up? One possibility is the underground economy. Other possibilities are homelessness and crime. Their families will be pauperized. Their children will be far more likely to turn to truancy and juvenile delinquency. And the city's threadbare social safety net will be strained that much more.

The forced downsizing of American Apparel is more than a tragedy in its own right. It is a canary in the coalmine for how the most vulnerable populations in this country will fare under the Obama administration's economic regime. Immigrant workers and America's inner city communities are overlapping populations that have suffered from vicious attacks and malignant disregard under administrations going back much farther than Bush. Whether Obama continues this tradition of neglect and criminalization or whether he seeks to create real opportunities for economic advancement for these communities is a litmus test of whether the mandate for change is in fact a meaningful commitment to social justice or just another of a long list of specious campaign slogans offered as an empty promise to a population starved of hope.

Follow Leighton Woodhouse on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lwoodhouse

Comments

[mgloraine]

All of America's expectations for a progressive administration (based on campaign promises) are being deflated day by day. Obama is gradually revealing the sad truth that he has no intention to rock the boat of the political status quo. Everything the Cheney-Bush Gang did, Obama wants to do, too. He made a lot of promises to woo votes, but now that he's in the White House, the little people no longer matter. Now he performs for the ultra-wealthy, ultra-white, ultra-right-wing corporatist fat-cats who wield the checkbooks which dominate his current strategies. It's time to get used to the truth: Obama's just another sleazy politician with all the usual motivations. We'd better start looking for an actual progressive to replace him, or we'll all be doing the "Rahm Emmanuel Sellout Square Dance" for the foreseeable future.

[marinara]

In my humble opinion, hiring illegal immigrants is hardly the same as limiting unemployment. Can you see it from my point of view? You could be giving my job to an illegal immigrant. I respectfully disagree that you should be protected for hiring illegal immigrants.

[mgloraine]

So you have been trying to get a job in the clothing manufacture industry in downtown L.A.? And your applications have been met with a "don't call us, we'll call you" response? Those dastardly immigrants! Shamelessly taking up all of those cushy jobs which marinara has been yearning for!

So now that the presumed illegals have been slapped down and ushered out of the ranks of the gainfully employed, will marinara be reporting to work cutting fabric or manning the overlock?

I thought not...

[Builders]

Ten to twelve dollars and hour was fair wages in 1977. Is it still now? Apparently not, since they are hiring illegals to do the job.
While I am sympathetic towards the immigrants, I think they should have to obtain a work visa from a union hall. Mexicans have brought troubles on themselves by listening to the Pope's advice on birth control. When there are more people than the land can support, is this my problem? I am sorry. Pay $15 per hour and hire Americans. There are many available. We need to take back our jobs, and back it up by finding American Made clothes and buying them. Put your money where your mouth is. There is a made in usa website that has some American made clothes and is trying to grow.
We have damaged ourselves heavily by not looking at what we were buying. We go to the big box store and are charmed by the appearance of low price, but that dollar going to china eventually costs you your factory job and you lose your house to foreclosure.
Take a stand as a patriot. Enforce immigration laws and back it up by buying the products we make. It looks like you are paying a little more for it, but it means the labor in the factory can buy at your store.

[WorkingClass]

There are plenty of workers, black, brown and white, here in Louisiana who would be happy to take factory work at 10 or 12 dollars an hour.

In my humble opinion, we should close our borders to ANY further immigration. The people already here should receive amnesty, Our government should then devise a sensible immigration policy that benefits all Americans and not just the Chamber of Commerce.

[EdCoughlin]

Is it racist for me as a white man to root for the native born black man working hard to save his families way of life over the hispanic man who just crossed the border illegally to snatch that job away? I certainly don't think so.

We, as a nation, owe the first man a shot at a decent life since he was born into our society, a member by circumstance. He should, thus, be given every chance to succeed and not left out in the cold to die. His parents, grandparents, even maybe as far back as great, great great grandparents who may well have been slaves lived, worked, fought and died for this country at various times and so we owe a debt to this mans family that should be repaid by protecting his opportunities from those who would seek to snatch it away late in the 4th quarter by illegally running onto the field.

Why do people act as though we owe the same debt to someone who broke our laws to snatch food out of the mouths of the first mans family? It is not the rich and white who suffer, if anything being able to hire nannies, gardeners, maids and other help at pennies on the native born dollar is a boon. We owe those here by circumstance something more then to be pushed out of their own country, we owe them the right to live as Americans with dignity, employment and respect.

[drymartini1]

Flawed logic.

If the black man is uneducated or not skilled enough to get the job done at the wage the employer is offering but the hispanic man can, bravo to the hispanic man.

just because you are born here doesnt make you any special. Whats your worth to the employer is what your value is.

[texastrixie]

Beign born here does make you special. It makes you an AMERICAN. If we continue to try to employ everyone in the world - at an wage rate that continues to plumment, we will find the entire world will collaspe with us. If we work really hard at this, our grandchildren will find themselves back in the tenements of major cities, living in total poverty. So we will "win" when everyone in the world is poor as possible.

[EdCoughlin]

What I said is NOT that the hypothetical black man is inferior to the immigrant, but rather the illegal immigrant due to the desperate nature of the shadow economy will accept the jobs formerly given to lower skilled minorities (and whites) with wages and working conditions far below anything resembling a living wage.

It is not lack of skill that makes a wage of 5 dollars an hour (below federal minimum wage standards) an abomination or makes fundamentally unsafe working conditions wrong, it is the way that every working man in this country has been reduced to what the lowest common denominator will accept. That lowest common denominator is the desperate illegal working in the shadow economy. Without that extremely negative downforce on wages and working conditions things will improve for all native born workers of all races.

There is an endless supply of hard luck cases from hard luck countries (many of them even worse then Mexico which is relatively well off by Latin American standards) and we certainly don't have the jobs for all of them. There comes a point when you have to say "for low skilled workers the border is closed, we have so many that it is ruining the working class in this country" and we are well past that point.

[Norman Dodd]

Another WIN for do-gooding government intervention in the market.

think i will go watch that movie "Capitalism, a love story" again.:P

[mummblemouth]

I'm of two minds on this issue. One the one hand, I believe that the immigration issue is by and large a scape-goat for other problems. You hear the same arguments against immigrants in the UK and Australia as you do in the states, but in my experience it seems to be primarily rooted in race and class issues. On the other hand, I have lived and worked in three countries besides the US now and each time I had to abide by strict laws governing my living and employment. Why should the US be any different? Why can't American Apparel abide by the laws, and why aren't all people held to the same level of accountability (rich and poor alike)? There are plenty of legal citizens, especially in this economy, who would be willing to do the work. Do undocumented workers possess some special skill that US citizens don't have that would warrant bringing labor into the country? I understand their desire to escape the conditions of their home countries, but there are legal ways of doing it. If those legal ways don't apply, well I'm sorry, I wanted to work in Italy before finding my most recent job, but the opportunity wasn't there. I didn't break the law and do it anyhow.

[masher]

Nice try. If you aren't already, you should join the GOP. You are trying to ignore the fact that illegal workers are exploitable and that this drives down wages, standards, and drives up unemployment for legal citizens.

There is only so much work. The more labor there is available, the lower the wages are. Its basic economics. What you are arguing for is lower wages for all Americans and higher profits for corporations.

What about H-1B work visas? And what about all the fraud in work visa programs? All this illegal supply of labor in the US market is why wages have not gone up in the past 8 years. The GOP loves it this way, and I guess so do the Democrats and Obama.

[Leighton Woodhouse - Huffpost Blogger]

American Apparel pays $10-12/hr plus full medical benefits. That's better than a lot of employers in L.A. are paying their documented or U.S. citizen workers. American Apparel is exploiting nobody; they're paying well above what the market dictates for the labor they employ.

Undocumented workers are not responsible for wage stagnation in the U.S. The mass exodus of American manufacturing from corporate globalization and union-busting here at home have achieved that end all by themselves. You might find a convenient scapegoat in poor immigrants from Central America and China, but that doesn't make you an economist. It makes you a chauvinist.

[EdCoughlin]

Both outsourcing and illegal immigrants are jointly to blame. Really giving jobs to illegal immigrants at much lower then market wages is sort of "insourcing" where you are still removing the jobs from the decent wage American market and giving them to the same people you would be out sourcing them to and exploiting (but inside this country instead).

When you talk about the jobs Americans won't do also you have to understand that people are paid not only by the job they are getting, but also their next best option.

If you are a high school educated worker working at a job like grocery checker you are not paid just based on the market for high school workers, but also on your next best option (unskilled labor like construction or apparel manufacturing). This means that the severe drop in those wages due to an oversupply of labor (created in large part by 15 million mostly unskilled illegal immigrants) has depressed wages across the entire blue collar spectrum.

Yes it is possible that without the super cheap illegals to insource to the jobs would just go to Mexico, but even if that were true A) it would save the social costs of educating children, providing emergency room care ect since they would be living in Mexico and B) this problem of outsourcing could be fixed by favorable legislation, for example legislation putting quotas on Japanese cars brought a lot of Toyota car assembly to the southern US.

[WorkingClass]

Why doesn't American Apparel hire American citizens? I just don't get it. Are you saying American workers in LA wont work for that money? Are there simply no Americans remaining in LA?

[mikefina]

Hire LEGAL unskilled Hispanic and Asian workers. 100% of your workeforce can come from the desparate, poor, crime-riddled neighborhoods you describe, they can be legal citizens, and need a job.

What is the story here?

American Apparel wants to thumb their nose at the Immigration Enforcement in a passive-agressive political posturing maneuver. They use the illegal immigrant workers as pawns in their game.

All of this is a ginned up tempest in a teapot (to mix metaphors). Hire poor unskilled Legal workers.

[joelwisch]

Leighton Woodhouse complains about our enforcing the laws of the land, but he doesn't live with the illegal aliens. And they are not immigrants except to the illiterate and manipulators. They are illegal aliens. Illegal aliens and if you look at their criminal statistics, you see a huge number of people coming north to do crime, and winding up in jail. LOTS of narcotics come up with those illegal aliens, and those narcotics can be the major way they supplement their income. There is not much I can do to change what was said, but please do look at a couple of web sites.
http://www.numbersusa.com
http://www.fairus.org
http://www.cis.org
http://www.illegalaliens.us

I want the law enforced. Almost all of the American People want the law enforced. Anyone.. anyone who wants to change it all can sponsor an illegal alien and that will be fine.

But this too: the International community, the United States, and the United Nations see Mexico as one very good place to live. Not perfect, but that could change if those folks coming north demanded that from their government. That, I would add, would remove something close to 400 billion a year in welfare from State and Federal Budgets going specifically to the people this author is talking about.

[Alex GMA]

I am disappointed in the decision to persecute American Apparel because they've had the courage to stand up for the rights of their workers. This company was just forced to lay off almost 2000 workers who were putting money into the economy and supporting their families. Meanwhile LA remains riddled with sweatshops left and right, but because their owners keep their horrible practices in the dark, ICE refuses to do anything about it. Shame on you President Obama for ruining innocent lives while protecting the real criminals.

http://www.americanapparel.net/presscenter/dailyupdate/dailyUp.asp?d=30&t=1848

[masher]

If you entered another nation illegally then aren't you a criminal? You can't say these "innocent" people lost their jobs. They were taking work from Americans. Do you not care about working American families?

[Leighton Woodhouse - Huffpost Blogger]

Are you an American? Go apply for a job at American Apparel. They'll hire you to sew garments. Trust me. The workers there aren't taking jobs from any Americans. I'm so sick of people who wouldn't take these jobs if they were offered them complaining that their opportunities are being 'stolen' from them from people who will.

[SierraL]

I am sick of this criticism of President Obama. I don't its just the right-wing looking at the color of his skin.

[RedDogBear]

How is this criticism an example of racism? Are you seriously proposing that ANY criticism of Obama must be caused by racism? That is ludicrous. I campaigned for and voted for Obama and I think he is doing a fantastic job. He has avery difficult job cleaning up the foreign, military, infrastructure, and economic messes left by the most incompetent president in our history. But to say that he is somehow above criticism since any criticism is racism is ridiculous and dilutes the very real racism behind many of the attacks on him.

[masher]

Really. So has Obama done anything about H-1B fraud?

And what about Wall Street reform? Obama has bankrupted the FDIC to divert money to failed Wall Street banks. The same banks that failed who Obama is bailing out with our money are now giving themselves billions in bonuses. So I suppose you support that?

What about the GM bailout? GM is using that money to expand their Chinese manufacturing as they close more American factories. So Obama bailed out GM so they can move more jobs to China. If he had let GM die then there would have been a chance for a new American car company actually committed to the US.

But H-1B is my favorite. Even as Microsoft lays off 5,000 people, Obama is still using the argument that the federal government needs to import foreigners into the US to take jobs because were aren't enough technical people. There are over 2 million unemployed programmers!!!! Wages have not gone up in years!!!

And you think this is about Obama's skin!